France Champagne
Wine storehouses of Champagne
Maturing Champagne in wood, the Great Houses did that already fifty years ago…
Some, like Alfred Gratien, Bollinger or Krug continue this tradition with pride: it made their reputation!
Other, like Billecart-Salmon, are returning to it “not to use, as in times gone by, vats and barrels like vulgar containers, but to make a true vinification in the wood” specify Antoine and François Roland-Billecart.
The idea to design a wine storehouse using wood matured with the development of the Clos Saint Hilaire, a Blanc de Noirs millésime 1995, single-plot, single-vintage, which had a great success as of its marketing in 2005. The family then wanted to work out other millésimes by using the same process. The barrels multiplying and passing from 15 to 440 today, a place had to be found to store them. An unutilised storeroom, on the pavement of the Champagne House in Mareuil sur Aÿ, was reallocated and refitted as a wine storehouse at the end of 2009. But to succeed in keeping Champagne on the fruit and of a great freshness, all the while maturing them in wood was a technical gamble as the two brothers explain. Nothing was left at random. “The vintage must be of excellent quality (2011 for example will not be a millésime or the Clos Saint Hilaire). The barrels should not be too new because we do not seek content of tannins, but from the barrels of 3rd or 4th wines, having contained Chardonnay from Burgundy, the exchange with the wood happens without being too marked”. The walls covered with lime, chalk and clay are thermically insulated.
Marie-Caroline Bourrellis
The Moët & Chandon Cuverie of Mont Aigu
At the foot of the Mont Aigu lodge, an emblematic place of Champagne, near its centre of pressing of Oiry, Moet & Chandon built a fermenting room, answering to the evolution of its sales and also to partly store its reserve wines. Additional to that of Epernay, it will be ready for use for the pickin in 2012. The famous House equips itself with an innovating, respectful environmental friendly production tool, a pilot site for oenology!
This cuverie, monumental by its dimensions (120 m in length by 50m in width and 11 m in height, that is 6.000sqm on the whole) and its capacity 150,000 hectolitres (100,000 in 2012), is ideally situated in the landscape. It is 2/3 buried. The access for the visitors is at seven meters in height and the visit is carried out by gangways at the edges of the building, always on the same plan. Its architecture, signed Giovanni Pace, is really minimalistic. The base is out of concrete, the frame is metallic, and the walls are out of glass, without any obvious supporting structure to divert ones attention. Here the relationship of the inside to the outside is very strong. This building has a view on the vineyard and puts forward 137 half-sunken stainless steel tanks which take on; in this context, a glowing air of works of art.
Landscape integration, aestheticism … a step towards durable development, Moët & Chandon placed the totality of its sites under the sign of ISO 14001 certification. The cuverie of Mont Aigu does not make an exception and goes even further: it is also certified high environmental quality HEQ.
Marie-Caroline Bourrellis